by Steve Burden

Created on: August 25, 2010   Last Updated: June 12, 2011

A business owner who wishes to employ you, knows that your skills and abilities could be used to further their commercial success. The very same reasons they want you on their staff double up as very good reasons for you to work for yourself. Although an employer will stress the genuinely good reasons for being an employee, be mindful of the even better reasons to work for yourself. If your particular skills have value to an employer, they can certainly be used to your personal advantage should you choose to work for yourself. 

The profitability issue is high on the list of good reasons to work for yourself. Even if significant profits do not show for a few years, from the early days of working for yourself, when running the business is anything but a walk in the park, you are working towards the day profits do begin to show. Then, the long hours of dedication and commitment sown in the early years, will be seen from a better perspective.

Working for yourself is a zone where your personal characteristics are tested each day. This may be seen as self-inflicted pressure, but it also shows you are serious about winning. Success might be measured in profitability, but every bit as important, is that you grow in the skills of managing your time and resources. Taking the decisions that directly affect your professional life, strengthens self-confidence and increases your capacity to handle responsibility. 

Working for yourself will demand a good bit of multitasking. Self employment has its own set of legal obligations. Paying taxes, keeping proper records, dealing with accountants, keeping on good terms with your bank, keeping abreast of office work, the long list of phone calls to make, cash flow problems, all of these are part of the package that is self-employment. Managing these varied responsibilities requires a sound grasp of how all the aspects of business life, should run together.

Working for yourself is also a fast track to greater maturity, or at least, a quick way to meet with your own limitations. Appreciating the more specialised abilities of people who, more efficiently, can take care of the issues you understand less, is a recipe for a more rounded business. Rather than a sign of weakness, appointing clever people to positions of responsibility, is a small piece of self-knowledge used to good effect - a further step towards greater maturity! 

Never to explore the options that may lead to professional independence, is to squander an opportunity to know a greater sense of self-determination. Being employed by someone else is by no means, a bad thing, but deciding to work for someone else should be a matter of deliberate choice rather than being simply the way things work out.

As long as we work for someone else's financial well-being, we shall never know the many advantages of shaping your own professional future. It will always be more satisfying to work for yourself. We should never go to work - whether for yourself or for someone else - without initiative, guts and conviction. If you can show up for work with this initiative, guts and conviction, then wouldn't it be far better for you, if you are working for yourself?

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